Episode 187: Leading Through the Wait – Leadership Lessons from Genesis 21

—————————–

Today Counts Show episode 187

Preview

Jim: Because God could have told Abraham, “Hey, why are you listening to Sarah? Tell her to get her act together and we’re going to, you’re going to be a family. After all, that’s the idealism.” But no, that’s not what we see God do. He comes in as a judge and he basically looks at this mess and he goes, “You know what? It’s not going to work out.” Almost like he understands the humanness of things and he goes, “All right, Hagar and Ishmael, you guys need to go that way, and I’ll bless you and you guys.” And frankly, Ishmael would not be counted anyway as—

Appreciation of our Supporters

Winston: Hey, before we jump into the podcast, we want to thank all our donors and supporters who make the Today Counts Show possible. It’s through your generosity that we’re able to shape leaders through this content and this podcast. Be sure to like, subscribe, and follow wherever you find yourself coming across this content. All right, let’s get to the podcast.

Introduction

Jim: Hey, Pastor Matt and Pastor Winston, glad that you are joining me today on the Today Counts Show as we continue our discussions in the book of Genesis, which we have endeared the title at some point in this process as the Genesis Project. It’s been a little bit since we have dived in. We find ourselves in Genesis 21, but good afternoon to you guys.

Winston: Good afternoon.

Matt: Yes, glad to be here as always. This would be fun.

Jim: We always try to make these podcasts evergreen, but it’s difficult for me to just do business as usual without acknowledging that there was an assassination today. I believe today’s the 10th of September if I’m right. Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah at a gathering. He was a political activist and I know that he was very much known by the younger generation for sure. He was speaking their language, kind of had a posture that invited discussion from all walks of life, and it’s just a sad, sad thing.

The Genesis Project: Genesis 21

The Dysfunction of a Patriarch’s Family

Turning our attention today to Genesis 21, we go back in history and we’re revisiting, and I don’t mean this in a condemning way because there’s probably plenty of blame to go around for all of us, but we are visiting a patriarch’s family. Even the patriarchs had amazing dysfunction.

Just to catch everybody up, God promised a baby to Abram and wife Sarai, and they concocted their own idea of how that was going to happen, stepped outside of faith and trust in God, did their own thing—which we’ll revisit here in a minute. Time has gone by, and then as God promised, he did bring a child into their life. I think most people of that day, and probably us looking back in time, would call it a miracle for sure.

God’s Promise Fulfilled at the Right Time

And so this other boy is born, and now we have more tension in the family. There’s a lot to learn from this text, and there are speculations of all kinds that sometimes go outside what the scripture teaches, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that comes up in our discussion.

So, I’m picking up in Genesis 21, reading out of the New Living Translation, only because it does some of the commentating for us. It is an idiomatic translation, meaning it’s not word for word, but phrase by phrase, thought by thought.

It says this: “The Lord kept his word and did for Sarah exactly what he had promised. She became pregnant and she gave birth to a son for Abraham in his old age.” This happened at just the time God had said it would.” Remember, guys, the Lord and a couple of angels had made a physical visit to Abraham and there was discussion about this.

In verse 3 it says, “Abraham named their son Isaac. Eight days after Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him as God had commanded. Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born.” And Sarah declared, “God has brought me laughter. All who hear about this will laugh with me. Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse a baby? Yet I have given Abraham a son in his old age.”

I like that phrasing there: “I have given Abraham a son.” You can sense the pride and joy of that event.

Jealousy, Insecurity, and the Family Rift

Verse 8 says, “When Isaac grew up and was about to be weaned, we don’t know exactly when that was. We don’t know if that was 3 months, 6 months, 9 months—some even say a year. But anyway, when Isaac grew up and was about to be weaned, Abraham prepared a huge feast to celebrate the occasion.

But Sarah saw Ishmael, the son of Abraham and her Egyptian servant Hagar, making fun of her son Isaac. So she turned to Abraham and demanded, “Get rid of that slave woman.” Now technically, this is a wife. “Get rid of that slave woman and her son. He is not going to share the inheritance with my son Isaac. I won’t have it.”

I think there’s some license there in modern language.

Verse 11: “This upset Abraham very much because Ishmael was his son. But God told Abraham, “‘Do not be upset over the boy and your servant.'” Interesting that God’s language was very similar to Sarah’s language. “Do whatever Sarah tells you, for Isaac is the son through whom your descendants will be counted. But I will also make a nation of the descendants of Hagar’s son because he is your son too.”

God’s Compassion in the Wilderness

So Abraham got up early the next morning, prepared food and a container of water, and strapped them on Hagar’s shoulders. Then he sent her away with their son, and she wandered aimlessly in the wilderness of Beersheba.

When the water was gone, she put the boy in the shade of a bush. Then she went and sat down by herself about a hundred yards away. “I don’t want to watch the boy die,” she said, and she burst into tears. But God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, “Hagar, what’s wrong? Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Go to him and comfort him, for I will make a great nation from his descendants.”

Then God opened Hagar’s eyes, and she saw a well full of water. She quickly filled her water container and gave the boy a drink. And God was with the boy as he grew up in the wilderness. He became a skillful archer, and he settled in the wilderness of Paran. His mother arranged for him to marry a woman from the land of Egypt.

The Power of Laughter

Winston: A lot going on here.

Jim: Yeah, there really is. I mean, I could have stopped on every other phrase and made so much comment.

Winston: One of the things that early on jumps out to me, that’s always jumped out to me about this story, is the idea of laughter. Specifically in verse six: “God has brought me laughter.” Just that idea too—how often do we think about God bringing us laughter? I mean, we talk about joy, but even just the idea of laughter itself—comedy, that kind of thing.

In Genesis 18:12 it says, “So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, ‘After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?'” She laughed about the idea of having this promise, and now she’s laughing in a different context. She’s laughing at the reality that this came to pass.

I think about those dualities—when we are often presented with these impossible scenarios, and it’s almost laughable. Like, how could God do this specific thing? How could I ever experience anything different than I’m currently living?

And then, just like God, something happens and it’s like, “Oh, this is a reality. Something happened that I didn’t think could ever happen,” and I’m doing the same thing, but it means something different now. The power of laughter—it can be sarcastic, dismissive, or a celebratory acceptance of this beautiful reality. So I just think in that context, laughing is such an interesting topic that arises here.

God’s Sovereignty and Human Decisions

Matt: Yeah. I love the language at the opening of this because it’s in the—I think I’m reading this one out of the NIV. I always keep my ESV too. But you know, “The Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised.”

And I think there are times that we get into our own thought process of what we think should happen, or obviously we see this whole thing have played out. They tried it their own way with Hagar and Ishmael, but it is what God has promised. Because there’s obviously some disobedience here—there’s, “Let’s try to figure it out another way.”

But it reminds us again what God has said, what God has ordained—the sovereignty of God. That doesn’t give us a license to run off the rails and say, “Well, it’s going to happen anyway.” But it should give us a license to look back the other way and say, “Man, what would happen if we just trusted a little more?” Let the proof of God be what pushes us forward in trusting him.

Sometimes we just fail to do that. I’m with you, Jim. There’s so many things—every other phrase you could just stop. I mean, this is 25 years after the promise.

Jim: Yeah.

Matt: I mean, like a minute or two’s gone by—there’s been plenty of time.

Jim: Yeah, because he got the promise around 80, right?

Matt: Yeah, somewhere around there. About 25 years has gone by, and there’s so much packed in all of this on the front end.

And I love what you said about the laughter. That’s exactly right.

Faith, Laughter, and the Long Wait

Jim: I want to throw my two cents in about the laughter too, because when good things have happened in my life, whether I immediately attributed it to God’s hand or just in general, I do remember giggles coming out—good things, amazing things that happened to you.

This is not nearly spiritual, I don’t think, but last night I was laying on the couch sucking on some throat lozenges and watching the Tigers and the Yankees. No offense to those listening who are Yankee fans, but I can honestly say I very much dislike the Yankees. I would use a different word, but—

I don’t know if you guys saw it, but I’ve got this small market Detroit Tiger fan, and they’re playing the Yankees. The wheels came off for the Yankees, and they were just walking guys in. I just laid on the couch giggling. I was having so much fun watching the Yankees beat themselves. The Tigers literally just stood there with a bat in their hand and for the most part didn’t swing, and the runs just kept coming in. Final score—it was 2 to 2 when I picked up the game, and it ended at 12 to 2.

Matt: It’s unfortunate you’re also a Detroit Lions fan.

Jim: True.

Matt: The only thing you have going for you is the University of Michigan—on occasion.

Jim: On occasion.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Your Tiger days, man—you had some glory days back in ’87, but other than that–

God’s Sovereignty Over Our Mistakes

Jim: That’s so true. Yeah, so true. I think we’ve talked about this the last two or three episodes, once again we see God staying true to what he said. And in agreement with what you were saying, Matt, earlier—living sloppy, making mistakes—God is even sovereign over those things. Here we see God doing two things at the same time again. One is he’s doing what he said he would do, and the other is he’s redeeming something that was bad.

When you read this text out of one of the more literal translations and then read it out of this NLT and watching what the scholars do with the NLT—trying to smooth out the story. Because with the more literal translations, it’s kind of rough. There are all kinds of jagged edges that don’t make sense.

For example, it says that when Hagar left, Abraham put Ishmael on her back. And I’m doing the math going, “Wait a second, Ishmael had to be like a teenager.” That’s weird. But then when you read the NLT, they don’t interpret it that way. It was more of a figure of speech. That’s probably the best you can do on a literal translation.

But I did notice that he got up early in the morning. Maybe Abraham got up early in the morning, maybe that was just his deal—but I think there’s more to it. I think that this was a big deal. Can you imagine the gossip going on in this clan where you have now a woman, Hagar, who becomes a wife of Abraham, gives birth, and literally is grafted into the family and is kind of a big deal.

The Battle Between Flesh and Promise

Matt: Well, then it, you know, the spiritual parallels here as well with Ishmael being considered the son of the flesh or the backup plan. And we see the spiritual fight already between the son of promise and the son of my fleshly desire to help God out. We see him scoffing already at Isaac.

I think the language is there for it to say that the son of the flesh was scoffing at the son of the promise. Just that spiritual war that goes on because, as we’ve talked about at length, the Bible is so layered with so much depth. You don’t have to stretch a scripture. You shouldn’t stretch any scripture very far, but I’m just saying you shouldn’t have to stretch it to see the parallels of what’s happening here—Abraham living in the consequences of his decisions.

While I think this kind of goes back a little bit, Jim, to what I said earlier. While God is sovereign and God’s plan was fulfilled, it was complicated, and they did have to live—and we still today are living—in the consequences of the bad decisions. Even though the sovereignty of God was played out, the son of promise was born. The lineage did go through him. Isaac did accomplish what God had intended through Abraham. But there were still consequences to the other bad decisions.

So, I think that’s probably what I was trying to say earlier. Even though the sovereignty of God is going to happen, we can make it a little bit muddy with our bad decisions.

God’s Involvement in Complicated Matters

Jim: You know, what encourages me—and I’d like to see how you guys respond to this—what encourages me is that what I see here is that God is willing to get involved in the complicated matters of our lives. In some ways, God is more practical than we are. In other words, my idealism says, “Well, why can’t we just all get along? Why can’t we just, you know, okay, we made a mistake, but we’re one big family?”

But if you read the text, it seems pretty clear that because God could have told Abraham, “Hey, why are you listening to Sarah for? Tell her to get her act together, and we’re going to—you’re going to be a family after all. That’s the idealism.” But no, that’s not what we see God do.

He comes in as a judge, and he basically looks at this mess and goes, “You know what? It’s not going to work out.” Almost like he understands the humanness of things and says, “All right, Hagar and Ishmael, you guys need to go that way, and I’ll bless you. And frankly, Ishmael would not be counted anyway as one of the sons of the blessing.”

So, in a weird way, I’d like to get you guys’ response on this. I’m going, “Wow,” because for me, I can be so idealistic where, when I read the Bible, it should look like this—it should be heaven on earth. But this is not heaven on earth, and God seems to understand that better than I do.

The Church and the Trap of Idealism

Winston: That’s really good. That’s really good. Yeah. I feel like Pastor Matt and I were talking about this in a similar context with certain views on church and how church is supposed to respond to social matters. Pastor Matt, can you share what you shared with me about the content you came across about what the church is doing for the community?

Matt: Oh, yeah. So, I heard a pastor say he was asked, “What does your church do for the community?” And I paused for a second, looked back at him, and said, “Church.” That was the pastor’s response. And his point was, he went on to elaborate that, you know, you can change their meal or their diet for one day with some food.

You can change their attire for a couple of weeks or months with some clothes. But what happens when a family, a single mom, or a kid—or whatever situation—walks through the doors of the church? They meet Jesus, they begin to grow in their faith. They begin to mature in their faith, they become a Christ follower. Then the community gets better. Then the community changes because of what they experienced at church.

God’s Sovereignty Beyond Our Understanding

Sometimes we get caught in this idealism. I love the way you put it, Jim, because God has a way of showing us something different. While you were saying this—and I’ll let Winston jump back in in just a minute—but as you were saying this about “let’s all just be one big happy family,” God in his sovereignty was looking ahead to present day, to the end of time, and would know that it would still be that Israeli-Palestinian conflict which would drive the world into chaos while others are screaming, “Peace, peace, peace.”

The world’s going to dive into chaos because of that. And it comes out of this arrangement of stepbrothers right here. So, I’m with you, Jim. Ideally, come on, guys, let’s get along. Let’s just be happy. It’s not that big of a deal. Calm down. Quit getting your feelings hurt. But in God’s sovereignty, it’s also going to be the thing that drives to the perfect place of a new heaven and new earth and a place called heaven.

Idealism vs. Conflict Resolution

Winston: Yeah. I think the idealism that you’re talking about, Jim, that we all gravitate towards in the face of conflict, is a way of avoidance that we don’t want to call it that. Idealism feels like a good answer or response to chaos, disorder, or conflict. But I feel like this is God modeling conflict resolution. There are clear boundaries. There’s clear direction. It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel like the Disney story where everybody gets along and everybody gets what they want. But it’s necessary for what must happen and how everything must transpire and go forward.

So, I think this story and scripture is constantly challenging our idealism because we often have to ask, where is our idealism originating from? It’s originating from the fact that we don’t want to do the hard things. Abraham, you could feel the tension in the story. Abraham was like, “Ah.” I think it said–

Matt: He was distressed.

Winston: He was distressed.

Matt: Verse 11: He was distressed.

Winston: And what happens when we get distressed? All right, let’s figure out the shortcut to make all of this work versus asking, “What’s going to be the long road to everybody’s well-being? What’s the entire picture?” Of course, Abraham can’t see the entire picture—only God can. And so, in our feelings, our fear of rejection.

Matt: Our own insecurities.

Winston: Insecurities. We shortcut it and lean into that idealism to avoid what needs to happen.

Story Ad

There have been seasons in my life where I’ve looked back and thought, “What was that even about? Did I grow in that season? Did I get better? Am I still stuck in that season?”

If you have similar thoughts, I want to introduce you to a book called Story: The Art of Learning from Your Past. This book, written by Jim Piper, shares principles and stories that actually help us get unstuck and step into the future we’ve always wanted. Be sure to stop by leadtodaycommunity.com to grab your copy today.

Facing Insecurity: When Avoidance Meets Faith

The Fear of Failure and the Illusion of Control

Jim: Yeah, boy. We’re really tapping on something here that I don’t think the three of us realized we were going to talk about. But now I’ll take it even a step further. You guys have already kind of laid the carpet out for me when Matt threw in the term “insecurity” and Winston talked about “avoidance.”

I just had the thought come over me that for those of us who don’t like to fail, if we don’t grapple—if we don’t hold on to the idealism—then that means I’ve got to live with failure. That I’m part of this. I’ve caused this. I was at least part of causing this.

Three Relationships, One Struggle

I read something today when I was studying that was so simple, but you know how you can read a sentence and go, “Oh, that’s so true.” I don’t know if it fits this context exactly right, but I was reading about mindsets, and it said the problem with relationships—the challenge with relationships—is that there’s you, there’s your partner, so you kind of know where you’re going there, right?

There’s you. You’ve got your stuff. Your partner, they have their stuff. But then there’s the relationship. So, there are three dynamics before you even bring all those things together. No wonder relationships are difficult.

It’s a book that I was reading and doing some research that we’re just talking about where you triggered– Winston, you’re the one that triggered this. It was talking about how people with a fixed mindset, they run out of relationships because they conclude, “Well, we’re just not a good fit.” But really, when you do the work, it’s, “No, we don’t want to do the work.” That’s what it is. We don’t want to confront what we need to confront. And that might be a bigger part of this.

Hagar, Desperation, and Divine Timing

There’s another thing I’m going to throw out here. When God was consoling Abraham and telling him, “Hey, look, do what Sarah said. Get them out of the camp, because I’m going to make him a great nation anyway.” Apparently, he didn’t tell Hagar that, because as you recall, once they were kaput. I see this teenager, who a lot of times the will of a teenager will fall way short of his mother’s. Even if he’s physically stronger, he’s emotionally typically weaker.

So, I’m seeing them wandering through the desert, and he’s doing the teenage thing, and she realizes he doesn’t have what it takes to keep going. What is she going to do? She can’t carry him. So they collapse together under the bush. Then she gets herself up to separate emotionally from the situation, sits there, and then God speaks to her and says the same thing to her that he said to Abraham.

So, I asked myself, why didn’t Abraham give her some hope? Did he forget? Did he wonder about it? And, like some men do, it just gets stuck in the noggin and doesn’t come out of the mouth? Or was that all part of God’s plan anyway, where he wanted Hagar to hear it from him at this most desperate time? I don’t know. But you know how my mind goes—I wonder about those kinds of things. What do you think?

Matt: Your mind wandering is the best part of this conversation. Always. Always.

Jim: Well, you should see my Bible. I’m circling those and have a line to it, and I’m going, “What the—? I guess men’s communication wasn’t any better back then than it is today.”

The Blindness of Despair

And then, of course, God opens Hagar’s eyes. It doesn’t say God dropped in a well. It said he opened her eyes so she could see the well. So, there was already a well there—that’s how I read it.

And Winston, you said in an episode ago or two or three, you talked about how desperation—how did you say it? Desperation leads us. Desperation drives us. And I always find it interesting that we can be in the presence of a savior, we can be in the presence of a friend, we can be in the presence of help, we can be in the presence of answers—but if we’re in the wrong state, we don’t see it. We can’t see it.

I wonder how many times that’s happened in my life.

Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes

Winston: In that vein, I was recently talking to a friend, and we were just talking about the idea of how unaddressed pain—and it doesn’t have to be major traumatic pain—but you just take a nick here and there, and it just kind of stacks, and it just lulls you to sleep. You just start becoming unaware of things you should be aware of. Right? The well is right there, but I’m really thirsty because I’m so distracted or I’m so discouraged by what’s going on, and my attention’s taken away. And so it’s just subtle. It’s a slow drift.

I wonder even about Abraham—if he was so kind of just distraught about the whole thing that that major detail about, “Hey, if this is of any encouragement, your son is also going to be a great nation,” it just wasn’t front of mind. He was trying to process: What does this dynamic look like? Or how do I even sever this relationship? All the human dynamics that would go into this.

Abraham’s Plan vs. God’s Promise

He’s given up his idea, if you will. This was his plan. This was his answer to the promise—which I also kind of thought in a separate train of thought was interesting. He didn’t do all of this out of his own volition of wanting to be the father of many nations. God called him to that, and then his response to that was this. So it was with good intentions. He was trying to help God. But even his good intentions were terrible. His good effort, his good try, led to pure chaos and dysfunction.

And so how many times do we try to justify our decisions with, “Well, I was just trying to do the best that I could,” right? And it’s like you can’t justify your disobedience, or you can’t justify a poor decision with good intentions. So many of us try to put our hat on good intentions, and good intentions don’t help anybody.

God’s Wisdom in Imperfection

Jim: I kind of softened as I meditated on this text. I kind of softened. In the beginning, I felt a tension towards Sarah. I tried to go into the story. I tried to be one of them. And I even imagined myself in the camp when I’m reading the text. When I see Sarah complaining, when I first read through it, or the first 10 times, or 100 times, however many times—for years in my life—I never viewed Sarah well. I just haven’t. But it wasn’t until recently that I thought, wait a second.

Let’s bring this back to the marketplace. I hire somebody, and I like them, and I think they can help the team. But as time goes by, they do some things. They become something that I don’t like anymore. The text does give you a bit of a—not just this text, but in the previous text—it gives you a sense that Hagar was getting a little sloppy and sassy in her posture. And now the older half-brother is picking on the little brother. Okay. There’s probably more to it.

Matt: Maybe repeating something he had already heard at home.

Jim: Yeah. And I already chuckled about it earlier. I just love how the NLT committee picked this term: “I won’t have it.” I think I remember my grandmother saying that, “I won’t have it.”

The Perfectionist’s Dilemma

And again, for me, it’s like, “Jim, you’re such a perfectionist. You think everything needs to be engineered perfectly, and then everyone should get along, and everyone should forgive, and we should be able to do this in this world that is filled with sin and jealousy and all these sins and weaknesses.”

We don’t feel good sometimes. I’ve been struggling the last few days, and you’re just not yourself. As a human being, you start getting the sniffles, you start getting this and that, and you’re not yourself. You’re not as productive. And that’s the weakness part.

Then you’ve got the sinful part. You put all that together—and how in the world do I come up with these utopias in my head, holding out, holding out, holding out?

But I don’t know. That’s kind of where I land the biggest on the story—that I need to be paying attention to God’s wisdom as I consider the dream, the idealism, the fairy tale. I don’t want to give up on that all the time. But there is practical wisdom that apparently is godly in the midst of all this stuff.

Wisdom Lives in the Middle

Winston: I think to your point, we often don’t associate wisdom with tension, and we try to categorize wisdom in the umbrella of idealism. The way that I kind of see it is: idealism is one end of the spectrum, and then fatalism is the other end of the spectrum. Both cause us to abdicate the responsibility of living in the tension of wisdom.

So it’s this—that there’s the opportunity to be super idealistic and opportunistic and think, “This could all work out,” or you could take it the whole other way and just scratch the whole thing: “God can’t use this. None of this is going to work.” Versus: “Oh, it’s going to work, but it’s not going to work the way you think it is, and we’re going to walk out the consequences of your decisions as well.”

Trusting God’s Plan

Matt: I’m bouncing around the story and the range of emotion that is just simply in the story. I mean, we go from “God has promised,” “God has said,” “God is sovereign,” laughter, to a mother that’s put her boy over to the side because she can’t stand to watch him die from lack of water.

And there’s just disagreement in this story. There are all these underlying issues that we’ve kind of talked through a little bit. And in the midst of all of that is still God showing up and speaking. God showing up and hearing the cry of a boy.

It’s interesting that the Bible says it twice. The story says twice that God heard the boy crying. It says, “Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies here.” So it reiterates it twice—even though we don’t understand it. He has a plan. And you’re like, how is this going to work out?

We Wouldn’t Write the Story This Way

God was with the boy as he grew up. I mean, we wouldn’t have written the story that way. That’s just not how our idealism works either. Our idealism would have written the story that they all—God was with all of them—as they grew up together. Our fatalist side would have written the story of: Hagar and the boy went out there and died, and it was the end of the story. Or something with Abraham, something with Isaac. We would have written it a totally different way.

And God’s like, “No, there’s another path here that you know not of.” And then you’ve got to trust me. You’ve got to trust me.

Jim: It’s interesting how we can read a story, and we’re these commentators sitting in the bleachers. And then when Matt, you go through something, I can say to myself, “Well, he just needs to do this, this, and this.” Or Winston, when you go through something, “You just need to do this, this, and this.” But when I go through something, it’s a crisis of faith. Crisis of belief.

And you guys are thinking, “Yeah, Jim just needs to do this.”

Matt: Do these three things, you’d be good.

Jim: Right? Yeah. It’s always three things, too, right? It’s always—you’ve got to do those three things. That’s at least what I teach. It’s always three things. Four is too many to remember.

Matt: Oh, that’s funny. Yes.

Joseph and the Unlikely Hand of God

Jim: I can’t help but go to where I’m excited about going in our Genesis project—to seeing the patriarchs laid out. And I see that whole thing with Joseph. Matt, while you were speaking, I thought to myself, “You were saying we wouldn’t write it that way.” Yeah, you’re right. I would not write it that way. I’m going way ahead of us, but I would not write a story about a spoiled boy who gets mistreated—a spoiled and favored boy who gets mistreated by his older siblings, thrown in a pit, sold out to slavery.

And then, of course, as you guys know as you read through the story—even all these bad things that happened to Joseph—there’s that little tagline: “But God’s hand was on him.” “But God’s hand was on him.” And there’s no coincidence about it at all.

So again, how does God do that? How does He lean in and look at this mess and then start moving the chess pieces to accomplish what He was going to accomplish from the beginning? It blows me away.

Passing Faith Tests

When Faith Feels Like Failure

And what I was trying to say—unless you guys have anything else, we’ll draw this one to a close—what I was trying to say is it’s easy to read this text and say, “You guys did this because you didn’t have any faith.” It’s easy for me to look at Winston’s trouble, Matt’s trouble, and say this about you. It’s easier for you guys to say that about me. But it really is—we’re supposed to be doing this so that maybe we can pass some tests. Maybe we can pass some faith tests. Even some would be better than none.

And that’s kind of where my prayer went. I shared with somebody in our community just a week ago. This person was saying that they feel like they were failing in some tests that they were going through. And it just triggered my mind about the big ones in my life. And I had to confess. I said, “You know, if anybody knew that story, they probably wouldn’t want to write about it. And if somebody knew that story…”

So I told this person, I said, “Yeah, if you put, say, the top five challenges in my life on a report card, I’m afraid I’d get straight Fs.” That’s just the truth. So when I come out of those, am I better? That’s what I hope. That’s what I hope.

Base Hits and the Beauty of Small Ball

And when I do pass a test—I mean, I passed a little one, I think, yesterday. It started on Monday. And it really was a little one. But because of how I was feeling physically, I really had to dig down deep. And I’m not just talking about my flesh. I’m talking about faith. There was something I needed to do by faith.

Compared to those other five or seven things I was referring to, it really was small. But you look for those kinds of base hits. It’s kind of like the idealism in baseball. I’m watching my team, and idealism says: everybody gets up and hits a home run. Everybody gets up and hits a home run. But my favorite guy strikes out, and then we have bases loaded and no outs. Surely we will get a run in. But sometimes that doesn’t happen.

So you have to learn to play small ball and not just swing for the fences. And I kind of relate that to life. If we can acknowledge our failures, that’s a starting point. But if we can also recognize that we’re human, that’s a humbling thing—and maybe sets us up for some wins when we’re able to walk with God in such a way.

Appreciate you guys very much. We’re going to be continuing the story here soon. And for those of you listening, if you’re enjoying this walking, talking, thinking through the book of Genesis, tell a friend.

Outro

Winston: Hey, thank you so much for joining us on the Today Counts Show. We’ve got so much more planned for you, so stay tuned and stay connected on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and subscribe on YouTube. And remember: Today counts.